There is an air of impoverished drabness, of tired routine, of stagnant monotony in all our cultural activities—from stage and screen, to literature and the arts, to the allegedly intellectual publications and discussions. There is nothing to see or to hear. Every thing produces the effect of déjà vu or déjà entendu. How long since you have read anything startling, different, fresh, unexpected?

Intellectually, people are wearing paste jewelry copied from paste jewelry by artisans who have never seen the original gems. Originality is a forgotten experience. The latest fads are withering at birth. The substitutes for daring and vitality—such as the screeching hippies—are mere camouflage, like too much make-up on the lined face of an aging slut.

The symptoms of today’s cultural disease are: conformity, with nothing to conform to—timidity, expressed in a self-shrinking concern with trivia—a kind of obsequious anxiety to please the unknown standards of some nonexistent authority—and a pall of fear without object. Psychologically, this is the cultural atmosphere of a society living under censorship.

But there is no censorship in the United States.

I have said that the fundamental cause of a culture’s disintegration is the collapse of philosophy, which leaves men without intellectual guidance. But this is the fundamental cause; its consequences are not always direct or obvious, and its working may raise many questions. By what intermediary processes does this cause affect men’s lives? Does it work only by psychological means, from within, or is it assisted, from without, by practical, existential measures? When philosophy collapses, why are there no thinkers to step into the vacuum and rebuild a system of thought on a new foundation? Since there was no philosophical unanimity, why did the collapse of falsehoods paralyze the men who had never believed them? Why do the falsehoods linger on, unchallenged—like a cloud of dust over the rubble? Philosophy affects education, and a false philosophy can cripple men’s minds in childhood; but it cannot cripple them all, nor does it cripple most men irreparably—so what becomes of those who manage to survive? Why are they not heard from? What—except physical force—can silence active minds?

The answer to this last question is: nothing. Only the use of physical force can protect falsehoods from challenge and perpetuate them. Only the intrusion of force into the realm of the intellect—i.e., only the action of government—can silence an entire nation. But then how does the cultural wreckage maintain its power over the United States? There is no governmental repression or suppression of ideas in this country.

As a mixed economy, we are chained by an enormous tangle of government controls; but, it is argued, they affect our incomes, not our minds. Such a distinction is not tenable; a chained aspect of a man’s—or a nation’s—activity will gradually and necessarily affect the rest. But it is true that the government, so far, has made no overt move to repress or control the intellectual life of this country. Anyone is still free to say, write and publish anything he pleases. Yet men keep silent—while their culture is perishing from an entrenched, institutionalized epidemic of mediocrity. It is not possible that mankind’s intellectual stature has shrunk to this extent. And it is not possible that all talent has vanished suddenly from this country and this earth.

If you find it puzzling, the premise to check is the idea that governmental repression is the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country. It is not. There is another way: governmental encouragement.

Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

Bearing this preface in mind, let us consider an example of the methods, processes and results of that policy.

In December 1971, Representative Cornelius E. Gallagher (D.-N.J.) declared in the House that “the National Institute of Mental Health has granted to Dr. B. F. Skinner the sum of $283,000 for the purpose of writing Beyond Freedom and Dignity.” On further inquiry, he discovered that “this merely represents the tip of the iceberg.” (Congressional Record, December 15, 1971, H12623.)

Human Events (January 15, 1972) summarized his findings as follows: “When Gallagher sought information about the Skinner grant and the scope and amount of government spending in the behavioral research field, the General Accounting Office reported back that the task was virtually impossible. Agency officials stated that there were tens of thousands of behavioral research projects being financed by government agencies. A preliminary check turned up 70,000 grants and contracts at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare and 10,000 within the Manpower Administration of the Labor Department. Thousands of additional behavioral projects, costing millions of dollars, also are being financed by the Defense Department, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Atomic Energy Commission, according to the General Accounting Office’s survey.”

In his speech to the House, Representative Gallagher declared: “The Congress has authorized and appropriated every single dollar in these grants and contracts yet, for the most part, we are unaware of how they are being spent.” And further: “. . . the Federal grant and contract system has inextricably intertwined colleges and universities with moneys authorized and appropriated by the Congress. I mean to imply no suggestion of a lessening of academic freedom in the Nation, but I do suggest that the Congress should at the very least be fully informed and, if need be, have the tools and expertise at our own disposal to counter antidemocratic thoughts launched with Federal funds.” (Congressional Record, H12624.)

Mr. Gallagher stated that he believes in Dr. Skinner’s right to advocate his ideas. “But what I question is whether he should be subsidized by the Federal Government [—] especially since, in my judgment, he is advancing ideas which threaten the future of our system of government by denigrating the American traditions of individualism, human dignity, and self-reliance.” (Ibid., H12623.)

If Mr. Gallagher were a consistent supporter of the American traditions he describes in the second half of his sentence, he would have stopped after its first half. But, apparently, he was not aware of the contradiction, because his solution was a proposal to create “a Select Committee on Privacy, Human Values, and Democratic Institutions . . . designed to deal specifically with the type of threats to our Constitution, our Congress, and our constituents which are contained in the thoughts of B. F. Skinner.” (Ibid., H12624.)

Nothing could be as dangerous a threat to our institutions as a proposal to establish a government committee to deal with “antidemocratic thoughts” or B. F. Skinner’s thoughts or anyone’s thoughts. The liberal New Republic was quick to sense the danger and to protest (January 28, 1972). But, not questioning the propriety of government grants, it merely expounded the other side of the same contradiction: it objected to the notion of the government determining which ideas are right or acceptable and thus establishing a kind of intellectual orthodoxy.

Yet both contentions are true: it is viciously improper for the government to subsidize the enemies of our political system; it is also viciously improper for the government to assume the role of an ideological arbiter. But neither Representative Gallagher nor The New Republic chose to see the answer: that those evils are inherent in the vicious impropriety of the government subsidizing ideas. Both chose to ignore the fact that any intrusion of government into the field of ideas, for or against anyone, withers intellectual freedom and creates an official orthodoxy, a privileged elite. Today, it is called an “Establishment.”

Ironically enough, it is The New Republic that offered an indication of the mechanics by which an Establishment gets established—apparently, without realizing the social implications of its own argument. Objecting to Gallagher’s contention that a deliberate policy may be favoring the behaviorist school of psychology, The New Republic stated: “The Gallagher account did not note that the Skinner grant was one of 20 Senior Research Career Awards, that is, plums for scientific leaders in ‘mental health’ across the board rather than a unique grant. No new awards of this kind have been made by NIMH since 1964, but 18 of them, which were originally for five years, have been renewed. Skinner’s was renewed in 1969, so his $283,000 amounts to $28,300 a year ending in 1974. . . . Skinner has continued to teach roughly one seminar a year at Harvard since 1964. In other words, his Harvard salary will be paid by the feds until [1974], a bonanza perhaps more rewarding to Harvard than to him, since he could command at least as large a salary . . . in a number of other places.”

Consider the desperate financial plight of private universities, then ask yourself what a “bonanza” of this kind will do to them. It is generally known that most universities now depend on government research projects as one of their major sources of income. The government grants to those “Senior” researchers establish every recipient as an unofficially official power. It is his influence—his ideas, his theories, his preferences in faculty hiring—that will come to dominate the school, in a silent, unadmitted way. What debt-ridden college administrator would dare antagonize the carrier of the bonanza?

Now observe that these grants were given to senior researchers, that they were “plums”—as The New Republic calls them coyly and cynically—for “scientific leaders.” How would Washington bureaucrats—or Congressmen, for that matter—know which scientist to encourage, particularly in so controversial a field as social science? The safest method is to choose men who have achieved some sort of reputation. Whether their reputation is deserved or not, whether their achievements are valid or not, whether they rose by merit, pull, publicity or accident, are questions which the awarders do not and cannot consider. When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men’s first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice. This will necessarily prompt committee members, bureaucrats and politicians to gravitate toward “prestigious names.” The result is to help establish those already established—i.e., to entrench the status quo.

The worst part of it is the fact that this method of selection is not confined to the cowardly or the corrupt, that the honest official is obliged to use it. The method is forced on him by the terms of the situation. To pass an informed, independent judgment on the value of every applicant or project in every field of science, an official would have to be a universal scholar. If he consults “experts” in the field, the dilemma remains: either he has to be a scholar who knows which experts to consult—or he has to surrender his judgment to men trained by the very professors he is supposed to judge. The awarding of grants to famous “leaders,” therefore, appears to him as the only fair policy—on the premise that “somebody made them famous, somebody knows, even if I don’t.”

(If the officials attempted to bypass the “leaders” and give grants to promising beginners, the injustice and irrationality of the situation would be so much worse that most of them have the good sense not to attempt it. If universal scholarship is required to judge the value of the actual in every field, nothing short of omniscience would be required to judge the value of the potential—as various privately sponsored contests to discover future talent, even in limited fields, have amply demonstrated.)

Furthermore, the terms of the situation actually forbid an honest official to use his own judgment. He is supposed to be “impartial” and “fair”—while considering awards in the social sciences. An official who does not have some knowledge and some convictions in this field, has no moral right to be a public official. Yet the kind of “fairness” demanded of him means that he must suspend, ignore or evade his own convictions (these would be challenged as “prejudices” or “censorship”) and proceed to dispose of large sums of public money, with incalculable consequences for the future of the country—without judging the nature of the recipients’ ideas, i.e., without using any judgment whatever.

The awarders may hide behind the notion that, in choosing recognized “leaders,” they are acting “democratically” and rewarding men chosen by the public. But there is no “democracy” in this field. Science and the mind do not work by vote or by consensus. The best-known is not necessarily the best (nor is the least-known, for that matter). Since no rational standards are applicable, the awarders’ method leads to concern with personalities, not ideas; pull, not merit; “prestige,” not truth. The result is: rule by press agents.

The profiteers of government grants are usually among the loudest protesters against “the tyranny of money”: science and the culture, they cry, must be liberated from the arbitrary private power of the rich. But there is this difference: the rich can neither buy an entire nation nor force one single individual. If a rich man chooses to support cultural activities, he can do so only on a very limited scale, and he bears the consequences of his actions. If he does not use his judgment, but merely indulges his irrational whims, he achieves the opposite of his intention: his projects and his protégés are ignored or despised in their professions, and no amount of money will buy him any influence over the culture. Like vanity publishing, his venture remains a private waste without any wider significance. The culture is protected from him by three invincible elements: choice, variety, competition. If he loses his money in foolish ventures, he hurts no one but himself. And, above all: the money he spends is his own; it is not extorted by force from unwilling victims.

The fundamental evil of government grants is the fact that men are forced to pay for the support of ideas diametrically opposed to their own. This is a profound violation of an individual’s integrity and conscience. It is viciously wrong to take the money of rational men for the support of B. F. Skinner—or vice versa. The Constitution forbids a governmental establishment of religion, properly regarding it as a violation of individual rights. Since a man’s beliefs are protected from the intrusion of force, the same principle should protect his reasoned convictions and forbid governmental establishments in the field of thought.

Socially, the most destructive consequences of tyranny are spread by an indeterminate, unofficial class of rulers: the officials’ favorites. In the histories of absolute monarchies, it was the king’s favorites who perpetrated the worst iniquities. Even an absolute monarch was restrained, to some minimal extent, by the necessity to pretend to maintain some semblance of justice, in order to protect his image from the people’s indignation. But the recipients of his arbitrary, capricious favor held all the privileges of power without any of the restraints. It was among the scrambling, conniving, bootlicking, backstabbing climbers of a royal court that the worst exponents of power for power’s sake were to be found. This holds true in any political system that leaves an opportunity open to them: in an absolute monarchy, in a totalitarian dictatorship, in a mixed economy.

Today, what we see in this country’s intellectual field is one of the worst manifestations of political power: rule by favorites, by the unofficially privileged—by private groups with governmental power, but without governmental responsibility. They are shifting, switching groups, often feuding among themselves, but united against outsiders; they are scrambling to catch momentary favors, their precise status unknown to their members, their rivals, or their particular patrons among the hundreds of Congressmen and the thousands of bureaucrats—who are now bewildered and intimidated by these Frankensteinian creations. As in any other game devoid of objective rules, success and power in this one depend on barkers (press agents) and bluff.

Private cliques have always existed in the intellectual field, particularly in the arts, but they used to serve as checks and balances on one another, so that a nonconformist could enter the field and rise without the help of a clique. Today, the cliques are consolidated into an Establishment.

The term “Establishment” was not generally used or heard in this country until about a decade ago. The term originated in Great Britain, where it was applied to the upper-class families which traditionally preempted certain fields of activity. The British aristocracy is a politically created caste—an institution abolished and forbidden by the political system of the United States. The origin of an aristocracy is the king’s power to confer on a chosen individual the privilege of receiving an unearned income from the involuntary servitude of the inhabitants of a given district.

Now, the same policy is operating in the United States—only the privileges are granted not in perpetuity, but in a lump sum for a limited time, and the involuntary servitude is imposed not on a group of serfs in a specific territory, but on all the citizens of the country. This does not change the nature of the policy or its consequences.

Observe the character of our intellectual Establishment. It is about a hundred years behind the times. It holds as dogma the basic premises fashionable at the turn of the century: the mysticism of Kant, the collectivism of Marx, the altruism of street-corner evangelists. Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships—in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China—plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil—except government money, which is the solution to all problems. The intellectual Establishment is frozen on the level of those elderly “leaders” who were prominent when the system of governmental “encouragement” took hold. By controlling the schools, the “leaders” perpetuated their dogma and gradually silenced the opposition.

Dissent still exists among the intellectuals, but it is a nit-picking dissent over trivia, which never challenges fundamental premises. This sort of dissent is permitted even in the Catholic Church, so long as it does not challenge the dogma—or in the “self-criticism” sessions of Soviet institutions, so long as it does not challenge the tenets of communism. A disagreement that does not challenge fundamentals serves only to reinforce them. It is particularly in this respect that the collapse of philosophy and the growth of government power work together to entrench the Establishment.

Rule by unofficially privileged private groups spreads a special kind of fear, like a slow poison injected into the culture. It is not fear of a specific ruler, but of the unknown power of anonymous cliques, which grows into a chronic fear of unknowable enemies. Most people do not hold any firm convictions on fundamental issues; today, people are more confused and uncertain than ever—yet the system demands of them a heroic kind of integrity, which they do not possess: they are destroyed by means of fundamental issues which they are unable to recognize in seemingly inconsequential concretes. Many men are capable of dying on the barricades for a big issue, but few—very few—are able to resist the gray suction of small, unheralded, day-by-day surrenders. Few want to start trouble, make enemies, risk their position and, perhaps, their livelihood over such issues as a colleague’s objectionable abstract notions (which should be opposed, but are not), or the vaguely improper demands of a faculty clique (which should be resisted, but are not), or the independent attitude of a talented instructor (who should be hired, but is not). If a man senses that he ought to speak up, he is stopped by the routine “Who am I to know?” of modern skepticism—to which another, paralyzing clause is added in his mind: “Whom would I displease?”

Most men are quick to sense whether truth does or does not matter to their superiors. The atmosphere of cautious respect for the recipients of undeserved grants awarded by a mysterious governmental power, rapidly spreads the conviction that truth does not matter because merit does not matter, that something takes precedence over both. (And the issue of grants is only one of the countless ways in which the same arbitrary power intrudes into men’s lives.) From the cynical notion: “Who cares about justice?” a man descends to: “Who cares about truth?” and then to: “Who cares?” Thus most men succumb to an intangible corruption, and sell their souls on the installment plan—by making small compromises, by cutting small corners—until nothing is left of their minds except the fear.

In business, the rise of the welfare state froze the status quo, perpetuating the power of the big corporations of the pre-income-tax era, placing them beyond the competition of the tax-strangled newcomers. A similar process took place in the welfare state of the intellect. The results, in both fields, are the same.

If you talk to a typical business executive or college dean or magazine editor, you can observe his special, modern quality: a kind of flowing or skipping evasiveness that drips or bounces automatically off any fundamental issue, a gently noncommittal blandness, an ingrained cautiousness toward everything, as if an inner tape recorder were whispering: “Play it safe, don’t antagonize—whom?—anybody.”

Whom would these men fear most, psychologically—and least, existentially? The brilliant loner—the beginner, the young man of potential genius and innocently ruthless integrity, whose only weapons are talent and truth. They reject him “instinctively,” saying that “he doesn’t belong” (to what?), sensing that he would put them on the spot by raising issues they prefer not to face. He might get past their protective barriers, once in a while, but he is handicapped by his virtues—in a system rigged against intelligence and integrity.

We shall never know how many precociously perceptive youths sensed the evil around them, before they were old enough to find an antidote—and gave up, in helplessly indignant bewilderment; or how many gave in, stultifying their minds. We do not know how many young innovators may exist today and struggle to be heard—but we will not hear of them because the Establishment would prefer not to recognize their existence and not to take any cognizance of their ideas.

So long as a society does not take the ultimate step into the abyss by establishing censorship, some men of ability will always succeed in breaking through. But the price—in effort, struggle and endurance—is such that only exceptional men can afford it. Today, originality, integrity, independence have become a road to martyrdom, which only the most dedicated will choose, knowing that the alternative is much worse. A society that sets up these conditions as the price of achievement, is in deep trouble.

The following is for the consideration of those “humanitarian” Congressmen (and their constituents) who think that a few public “plums” tossed to some old professors won’t hurt anyone: it is the moral character of decent average men that has no chance under the rule of entrenched mediocrity. The genius can and will fight to the last. The average man cannot and does not.

In Atlas Shrugged, I discussed the “pyramid of ability” in the realm of economics. There is another kind of social pyramid. The genius who fights “every form of tyranny over the mind of man” is fighting a battle for which lesser men do not have the strength, but on which their freedom, their dignity, and their integrity depend. It is the pyramid of moral endurance.